The Good Death Through Time

A Senate committee investigation of Australias Northern Territory Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995, the first legislation in the world which allowed doctors to actively assist patients to die, found that for the vast majority of Indigenous Territorians, the idea that a physician or anyone else should help end a dying, suffering persons life was so foreign that in some instances it proved almost impossible to translate. This book explores how such a death became a thinkable even desirable way to die for so many others in Western cultures. Though euthanasia, meaning good death, derives from ancient Greece, for the Greeks this was a matter of Fate, or a gift the gods bestowed on the virtuous or simply lucky. Caring for the dying was not part of the doctors remit. For the Victorians, a good death meant one blessed by God and widespread belief in a divine design and the value of suffering created resistance to new forms of pain relief.